SOUNDS AROUND TOWN: Sam Moss brings all his 'Neon' colors to Atwood’s Tavern

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

Tuesday

Jul 3, 2018 at 2:08 PM

The musical voyage of Sam Moss goes like this: His earliest interest was playing jazz clarinet, like Benny Goodman did on the big band records Moss and his grandfather listened to. But his first instrument turned out to be the violin ... classical violin, mind you. Then came electric guitar. Then came acoustic guitar – all of this by the time he was 14. He later added banjo to the mix. There was a rock band in middle school (called After 3, because they practiced after school let out). All the while, Moss, who comes from Connecticut but currently lives in Somerville, was writing lyrics. But it wasn’t till recent years that he started singing.

At his July 10 show at Atwood’s Tavern in Cambridge, he’ll most likely have an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar, and he’ll be doing the singing in front of his band the Half Moons, featuring tunes from his new album “Neon.”

Moss admits that though he still regularly plays violin, he hasn’t figured how it should fit in with the current group, and that he’s been doing less banjo these days. But he’s playing more and more guitar.

“I think the first electric guitarist that blew me away was Stevie Ray Vaughan,” he said, “and that was several years before I played guitar. As far as an acoustic player, I’ll say it was Leo Kottke. When I was 17 my friend Gabe had gotten into Kottke. So, my first introduction to him was Gabe trying to play ‘The Driving of the Year Nail.” Gabe gave me a copy of that Kottke disc, and that was a really transformative discovery for me because I hadn’t yet done much with fingerpicking. But I kind of dove into learning that style on my own.”

Though Moss, 29, has been writing lyrics since he was around 12, he was never comfortable with singing in public, and his first few recordings were instrumentals.

“I also didn’t feel that my lyrics were good enough to share,” he said. “I do feel good about them now, but for the first 10 years that I was writing I wasn’t sharing them at all. Then a couple of things happened. I started to feel better about my voice. I would practice when I was in the car or when nobody was home. And I have a songwriter friend, Jackson Emmer, who was probably the first person I started showing my lyrics to, and he kind of pushed me to do more with my own songs. Around the time I started to do that, I moved to Vermont, and Jackson and I formed an old-time country duo called The Howling Kettles. I played guitar and fiddle, he played mandolin and guitar, and we’d both sing sloppy renditions of early American music. That got me more comfortable singing.”

A listen to “Neon” reveals gorgeous guitar playing on the instrumental “Interlude” and a voice that is all at once offbeat, comforting and, at some points, haunting throughout a set that ranges from ballads to pop songs.

The Atwood’s show will be Moss’ second of three monthly appearances there this summer, and he’s planning programs that will keep each of them different.

“I don’t want to play the same set each month,” he said. “So, I’ve been digging around. I do some songs from older records, I do some brand-new songs, a couple of covers. The set lists are pretty mixed bag. And I’m playing with a band at these shows: Justine Bowe on synth and vocals, Michael Siegel on bass, and Ben Burns on drums. They all play on the new record.”

For someone who writes so much of his own material, it’s interesting to find out that he could be doing a “couple of covers.” Like what?

“Oh, I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I know a lot of songs that aren’t mine. I love interpreting other people’s work, and I usually play at least one cover at every show. I’ve been doing Dylan’s ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ a lot recently. There’s a handful I love to play.